Every few years Google will go through a rather large and drastic algorithm tweak that leaves everyone in the industry running around and scrambling to try to fix any rankings their websites or their client’s websites might lose. There is a great deal of chatter in the industry lately that website load time is going to be a large factor for website rankings. Matt Cutts from Google has said that as it will be important it will not be a major factor yet. Matt describes it in a little more detail in the video below:

Google’s ultimate continuous goal with or without any search engine updates is to increase the speed and efficiency of the search engines which is always a very important aspect of anything technical and online. You really can’t blame Google for wanting to make their search engines highly efficient and lighting quick. After all it is all about the user experience when it comes to using a search engine and if over time the results take longer and longer to appear people will eventually be turned off. Is the search engine optimization industry just getting paranoid? Maybe a little bit but at the end of the day it is still really important to have a very quick and efficient website regardless of what Google says will be a ranking factor.

For all of those businesses large and small who might be worried their rankings will simply tank just from changing their hosting company can now sleep at night. Coming from Matt Cutt’s mouth he claims that changing your hosting company will not affect your SEO in any sort of way. This is assuming that you are moving to a quality hosting company and not to a server that is jammed up with other spammy websites. Changing a hosting provider can be a very scary moment for many businesses especially when your entire livelihood depends on your website. Any problems could put your sales for that day or week in a very tricky and dangerous situation.

Here is the video from Matt Cutts about Changing Your Hosting:

Always try moving your website to a quality hosting company. It might not directly reflect your rankings but you never want your company website to share a server with a handful of websites that might have slightly frowned upon services. If one of those website carries a virus onto the server the server could ultimately go down for some period of time.

Google announced on Dec. 1 that it had added a new region tag to top-level domains where a website’s location could not be discerned by a title tag or snippet and where the country code isn’t a clue. In other words, for .com, .net and .org TLDs.

Why would Google do that? Obviously, it’s because things can get confusing if you are looking for a specific result and you know where an organization is located, but you don’t know its URL. You perform your search and the results do not give you the clues you need to find what you want. Google’s example can be found on the official Webmaster Central Blog.

I think this is going to be a helpful tag and if you want to give away your location to help searchers find you more easily, all you need to do is log in to Webmaster Tools, click on Site Configuration – Settings – Geographic Target. Choose a country or region to associate with your site and your region tag will appear when appropriate.

My only concern with this is will you get pigeonholed into that region? Will, at some point, Google decide to show your website only to people searching from that region or will your site still be available globally? I hope the latter. I’d hate to see people’s businesses fall off because a search engine decided that because you are located in South Africa your site should only be seen by South Africans. That would be bad of that business conducted business throughout the world.

SEO tools are a dime a dozen. They are also essential for your success online. If you want to develop a successful SEO campaign then you need to take a look at the tools that you are using and make the best use of them.

One of the best free tools online is Yahoo! Site Explorer. It’s a simple tool really, but it is powerful when used correctly.

The obvious benefit to using Yahoo! Site Explorer is the ability to list your websites and check your inbound links. There are a few other free tools that do this so well, such as Google Webmaster Tools, which I highly recommend as well. The drawback (and benefit) to the Yahoo Site Explorer backlink tool is that it lists all the internal links from your own site as well as inbound links from other sites. You want good internal links, of course, but if the majority of your inbound links are links from your own site then you need to do some additional relevant link building (which should be on going and natural anyway).

But don’t just check the inbound links for your own site. Yahoo! Site Explorer also allows you to check the links of the sites that link to you. You should definitely do this. By looking at the links pointing to the sites linking to you, you have the ability to see what authority those sites are passing on to you. You can also follow those links to see if the sites are linking to you too. This is actually a good way to find new places that might be a potential way to market your company, website and to get a highly relevant link that will produce visitors.

Finally, Yahoo! Site Explorer can be used for competitive research. You can enter an URL of a domain you don’t own and check the links for it as well. Highly recommended. By knowing who is linking to you and who is linking to the sites that are linking to you, you get a full mental picture of your link portfolio and the authority that your links are passing on to you. Yahoo! Site Explorer is very good for that, so be prepared to spend some time!

New webmasters might be confused about the difference between visitors and unique visitors in your analytics program. If you’re not sure which metric is the more important of the two then perhaps you need to spend a little more time analyzing your traffic. Your Visitor count is the total number of visitors in the reporting period you are observing. Unique visitors is the number of visitors who have visited your site for the first time. Which is the more important metric for your site depends a lot on your site’s mission and your goals, but for most website owners, both metrics tell a story. Total visitor count is an important metric because it tells you precisely how many people who have been on your website. That’s important for determining your conversion rate. 1,000 visitors resulting in 100 sales equals a 10% conversion rate. You can build from that.

Unique visitors are important too, however. Most visitors will not purchase on the first visit. If you have a high unique visitor count relative to your total visitors then that means you are not getting many repeat visitors. That could be a telling sign that your content is not compelling enough. It could also mean that you are losing opportunities to convert traffic and close sales. Maybe your calls to action need work or you are losing visitors somewhere else within your sales pitch. Whatever the case, a high unique visitor count relative to your total visitor count means that most of your site visitors are not returning.

Measuring traffic is not all about raw numbers. It’s about reaching the right target market. And if you have a high unique visitor count relative to your total visitor count, it could be because you are not reaching the right target market. Maybe you need to target other keywords as part or your search engine optimization efforts or create better, stickier content to engage your visitors better to keep them coming back to your website.

Hopefully this will give you some helpful tips into the relationship between your total visitors and unique visitors. Knowing how to analyze your traffic numbers can go a long way to knowing how to solve your online problems and can help you craft a long term strategy for future success.

Some of the best things in life are free. Google Analytics is one of them…Google Analytics is one of the easiest tools to implement when it comes to ensuring that you are able to track your website statistics and have a working intelligence of your search engine optimization and search engine marketing efforts. You just set up an account and add the code provided to you to the footer of your website pages. Then you are able to view your statistics at a glance. There are elements that are perfect for the novice and expert users alike.

Here is a very helpful video about how to use Google Analytics:

To sign up for a Google Analytics account, migrate over to http://www.google.com/analytics/ and click the link on the right of the screen that reads “Sign Up Now”. You’ll see it just under the blue button labeled Access Analytics. You’ll receive an e-mail with a confirmation link. Click that link and sign into your Google Analytics account.

You should see a button that says “Get Started”. Click it and Google Analytics will walk you through the steps to set up your website for tracking. When you get the tracking code, simply insert it onto your web pages in the footer, before the closing body tag. You’ll have to do this for every page of your website. Google Analytics will not track the stats for any page that does not have this code.

It will take about 24 hours before you can view your statistics after including the code on your website. Once you do, you can use that information to better market yourself and make intelligent decisions about how you run your business and your website.

If you use Google Analytics, which is perhaps the best free analytics tool online, then you should know that the Google team behind it has added new features. These features are designed to help power users make the most of the analytics tool and to make the tool more flexible. I think Google succeeds on this one.

Here’s a run down of the new features:

• Two new goal types and expansion of the number of goals allowed
• Expanded mobile reporting
• Advanced Table Filtering
• Unique Visitor Metric for custom reports
• Multiple custom variables
• Sharing and custom reports expansion features
• Analytics Intelligence
• Custom Alerts

The video below contains the new Google Analytics features:

While all of these features are great new features for someone, I think two of the most robust off these features are the last two (Analytics Intelligence and Custom Alerts). You can set up GA to alert you weekly or monthly when certain important metrics occur on your site and Google Analytics will keep an eye on key metrics and notify you when important milestones are reached based on a programmed algorithm. Google Intelligence looks to be quite promising to all webmasters and I can’t wait to see it in action.

Learn more about these changes to Google Analytics on the GA blog.